Jim Groom

“Welcome to the People’s Republic of Non-Programistan”

The New Media Consortium’s Symposium on Mashups, April 1-3, 2008

This online presentation pushed the boundaries of presentation and performance while exploring the possibilities of using open, portable and user-friendly tools for teaching and learning. Following is the session description:

The time for revolution is here! The tools are now in the hands of the people. We’ll focus on how to use the mashup as a way to both save time and create a more powerful products using free and easy tools like WordPress, Google Apps and MIT’s Simile project. Now is the time to rise up and end mindless drudgery. Come and be educated! Come and learn the tools that will mean your freedom!

Session website: http://bionicteaching.com/ihatecode

Co-presenter:
Tom Woodward, Academic Technology Consultant, University of Richmond

To view the archived version of this session in Adobe connect follow this link.

“Don’t Call It a Blog, Call It Educational Publishing”

ACCS Conference of Virginia, March 14th, 2008

This presentation offered an alternative means of conceptualizing how university networks might approach supporting teaching and learning technologies by designing their online publishing systems around an RSS-rich aggregation system of open syndication, rather than closed repositories and Learning Management Systems (LMS) that seldom, if ever, allow or enable communication outside the walls of the course. Specifically, we described how the University of Mary Washington is using WordPress Multi-User to build an enterprise-level educational publishing platform, and how it has fundamentally transformed the online component of teaching and learning beyond the tools of the standard LMS. You can also take a look at the presentation website we created for this presentation here and/or listen to the audio from this session below.

Co-presenters:
Andy Rush, New Media Specialist, University of Mary Washington
Jerry Slezak, Assistant Director of Teaching and Learning Technologies, University of Mary Washington

Download Don’t Call It a Blog, Call It Educational Publishing

“Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform”

Northern Voice, February 22-24, 2008

Session abstract: “What if we didn’t understand what we do in education with blogs as blogging but as a quick and easy way to publish online within a learning community? Or a place to feature a portfolio of students best work? Or a site where professors and staff track their professional and personal development? What if we understood “campus blogging initiatives” as a community publishing platform to share, learn, and integrate various resources from around the web into a more specific community? What if blogging were no longer the focus as a keyword, and a publishing community was the crux of the process of development? What if faculty, staff, and students are given the ability to shape their online presence and frame their intellectual community alongside one another? What would be the nature of such a syndicated publishing architecture that could support such a change in the ways we think about teaching, learning, sharing, and archiving the academic work done on college campuses? This presentation will offer an alternative means of conceptualizing how university networks might approach supporting teaching and learning technologies by designing their online publishing systems around an RSS-rich aggregation system of open syndication, rather than closed, labyrinth-like repositories and Learning Management Systems that seldom, if ever, see the light of day.”

Co-presenters:
Brian Lamb, Coordinator of Emerging technologies, University of British Columbia
D’Arcy Norman, Educational technology Developer, University of Calgary
Bill Fitzgerald, Project Lead and “proprietor”of OpenAcademic.org

Download “Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform”

“Open Source, Open Learning, Open Communities: Exploring Alternatives to Blackboard”

Presentation for the CUNY IT Conference at John Jay College in New York City on November 30th, 2007

This panel examined three uses of open-source tools for teaching and learning, beginning with Mikhail Gershovich’s discussion of Baruch’s cac.cophany, a blog that has allowed the Bernard Schwartz Institute to share its work with local and global audiences. Followed by Matt Gold sharing his experience teaching an online new-media studies course with a number of open-source applications for collaborative writing and research projects. Finally, I presented the blogging initiative at UMW which has brought an entire institution into conversation with itself and the world.

Co-presenters:
Mikhail Gershovich, Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College
Matthew K. Gold, Faculty, New York City of Technology and the CUNY Online Baccalaureate

“Small Pieces Loosely Joined”: Open-Source Possibilities for Course Redesign
Co-presented with John More of Virginia Tech and Martha Burtis of the University of Mary Washington on November 9th, 2007 at the Learning by Design conference held in Richmond, VA.

This session explored how open-source applications can help shape and sustain vital communities of learning. We will discuss collaborative research/learning management systems such as Sakai and Moodle; blogging platforms such as WordPress; social networking applications such as Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter; web-hosting options both on- and offsite; and other innovative practices that center on emerging technologies. We will also consider Creative Commons licenses and implications for intellectual property.

Out of Print: Building a Digital Environment for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship
Co-presented with D’Arcy Norman of the University of Calgary on September 27, 2007 at the Open Education Conference hosted by Utah State University in Logan, Utah.

We propose the creation of an Open Content educational resource in history/literature, and documentation/support materials to enable others to easily and effectively create their own using freely available tools and services.

URLs for the session: http://earlyamericas.wordpress.com/ and http://opencontentdiy.wordpress.com/

Audio available:

Download Out of Print

Video available:

The Faculty Academy on Instructional Technologies is a free annual event hosted by the University of Mary Washington. For the past 12 years, Faculty Academy has brought together faculty and staff from both campuses at UMW to share and celebrate the year’s efforts and accomplishments in the classroom, with teaching and learning technologies as the specific focus (or, one might say, catalyst) of the event.

Below are three presentations a co-presented with several of my colleagues at the University of Mary Washington. Each of these presentations ahs associated resources if you would like more specific information about the topic, examples, etc.

• “Small Pieces Loosely Joined: Web 2.0 Learning Environments at UMW” Co-presented with Gardner Campbell, Steve Greenlaw, and Jerry Slezak (UMW)
  • Link to presentation overview
  • Presentation audio available below

• “Monster M*A*S*H*U*P*S” Co-presented with Patrick Gosetti Murray-John, Jerry Slezak, and Andy Rush
  • Link to presentation abstract with links to presentation notes

• “Hey, You Got Your Folksonomic Tags in My Semantic Web!” Co-presented with Patrick Gosetti Murray-John
  • Link to presentation slides

Audio available:

Download “Small Pieces Loosely Joined: Web 2.0 Learning Environments at UMW”

Download “Monster M*A*S*H*U*P*S”

Download “Hey, You Got Your Folksonomic Tags in My Semantic Web!”

Presentation description:

In 2004 three of us presented a concept of decentralized connecting web content with RSS — “Small Technologies Loosely Joined” (http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/smallpieces), playing off of the book title by David Weinberger. Looking back at what we might call “Web 1.5″, using RSS to interconnect blogs, wikis, and chat seem rather simple. At that time, flickr and del.icio.us were still truly unknown betas, Google was just a search engine, folksonomy might not even had been coined as a term, podcasting did not exist, online videos were relegated to basic downloading to view– what a long way the web has come since then. However, underneath the shiny hood of the new tools, RSS remains a key integration factor Now we sit in 2007 with an explosion and continued expansion, of “small tools” leaving many educators overwhelmed and excited at the same time.

In this session, like a loose jazz quartet, four presenters will “jam” on the potential for teaching and learning as well as the state of web technology in four general areas

* bliki : can we genetically recombine blogs and wikis?
* mashups – bending the internet to do your bidding
* connecting people and information – RSS, Pipes, aggregators…
* insanely social software – putting the “we” in “web 2.0″

And more broadly look at the influence of open-content, connectedness, and social networking aspects.

Link to presentation outline in wiki

Link to video of presentation

Link to (MAC) Learning Environments Online Conference site

Audio available:
Download “Open Social & Connected”

The Association of Collegiate Computing Services (ACCS) of Virginia is a state-level organization that sponsors this conference annually in Charlottesville, Virginia to foster the sharing of information among technology professionals in Virginia’s colleges and universities.

This presentation examined the ways in which folksonomic tagging and the semantic web can work together to make a more intelligent, searchable environment for web-based teaching and learning tool at the University of Mary Washington.

• “Needles, Haystacks and Omnivores: Finding and Consuming Information through Social Tagging and the Semantic Web” Co-presented with Patrick Gosetti Murray-John

NMC’s Web Video Convergence Online conference focuses upon emerging video-based forms of self-expression, with notable examples like video mashups, jumpcuts, and video blogging. I took part in two separate presentations during this two day conference, wherein I both framed a few of my favorite YouTube clips in terms of their narrative and educational possibilities. Additionally, I presented on the ways in which the impact of the multi-modal web environment may transform how we think about the ractive of writing the traditional college “paper.”

• “Web 2.0 Online Learning Film Festival” Co-presented with Brian Lamb, Gardner Campbell and D’Arcy Norman
  • Link to presentation wiki here

• Co-presented a poster with Andy Rush at the same conference titled “Vapers: Video Papers and the Future of Composition at the University” NMC Online Conference on the Convergence of Web Culture and Video

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.umwdtlt.org/vapers/flash/vapers2flash.swf” height=”329″ width=”481″ /]